A Few Security Predictions (but not necessarily for 2017)

Everyone’s doing predictions, and I tend not to like them. They tend to be either obvious or wrong.

But I am different in one key way in that I’m always doing predictions. The difference is that I’m not predicting anything for 2017 specifically.

Anyway, here are a few concepts I find interesting that I think we’ll be hearing more about in coming years.

More ransomware. Expect targets to have the magic combo of important and poorly defended. Think government, schools, hospitals, and law firms.

More focus on resilience. We have spent the entire time in infosec focused on prevention, and it’s not working. We’re not doing as well as we could be with prevention, but even if we were it’d still be possible for determined adversaries to get in. The better game is to make it less damaging when they do get in, or when the site is knocked offline, or whatever. Expect to see fault-tolerant services, backup and restore, information fragmenting, and similar type services.

Way more focus on RF security. Both actively controlled and autonomous drones are going to become more and more important in coming years. A big part of defending yourself from these systems is being able to disrupt either control signals or the circuitry inside the drones themselves. It’s a whole new attack surface, EMI and RF. Expect to see a lot about countermeasures in the space.

More AI used to separate the good from the bad. This one is obvious, and everyone’s talking about it. But it’s definitely coming.

More focus on HUMINT. Whether it’s insider threat or attacks from the outside. Expect companies and governments to be thinking less about tech and more about humans. Both as attackers and defenders.